This recording, released to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Tallis’s birth, features his largest and longest compositions for the church. Scored for 40 independent voices and widely acknowledged to have been written for 8 choirs of 5 voices to be arranged in a circle, Spem in alium is Tallis’s greatest masterpiece. In order to replicate the circle effect in surround, while avoiding an unnatural division and balance of the voices that would result from 5.0 or 5.1, we opted to make a 4.0 surround recording with two choirs in each quadrant. The singers were arranged therefore in the form of four sides of a huge St-Chad cross: Choirs 1 and 2 to the West, 3 and 4 to the North, 5 and 6 to the East, and 7 and 8 to the South.